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US Boy Scout leaders voting on blanket ban on gay adults

The Boy Scouts of America’s blanket ban on gay adult leaders could end Monday when a top policy-making board plans to vote. Church-sponsored Scout units, however, could be allowed to maintain the exclusion.

NEW YORK – The Boy Scouts of America’s blanket ban on gay adult leaders could end Monday when a top policy-making board plans to vote. Church-sponsored Scout units, however, could be allowed to maintain the exclusion.

The new policy, aimed at easing a controversy that has embroiled the Boy Scouts for decades, would take effect immediately if approved by the organization’s 80-member National Executive Board. Its members were convening for a closed-to-the-media meeting conducted by teleconference.

The stage was set for Monday’s vote back in May, when the BSA’s president, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, told the Scouts’ annual national meeting that that the long-standing ban on participation by openly gay adults was no longer sustainable. He said the ban was likely to be targeted by lawsuits that the Scouts were apt to lose.

Two weeks ago, the new policy was approved unanimously by the BSA’s 17-member National Executive Committee. It would allow local Scout units to select adult leaders without regard to sexual orientation — a stance that several Scout councils have already adopted in defiance of the official national policy.

In 2013, after heated internal debate, the BSA decided to allow openly gay youth as scouts, but not gay adults as leaders. Several denominations that sponsor large numbers of Scout units — including the Roman Catholic church, the Mormon church and the Southern Baptist Convention — have been apprehensive about ending the ban on gay adults.

The BSA’s top leaders have pledged to defend the right of any church-sponsored units to continue excluding gays as adult volunteers.

Gates, who became the BSA’s president in May 2014, said at the time that he personally would have favored ending the ban on gay adults, but he opposed any further debate after the Scouts’ policymaking body upheld the ban. In May, however, he said at the BSA’s annual national meeting that recent events “have confronted us with urgent challenges I did not foresee and which we cannot ignore.”

He cited an announcement by the BSA’s New York City chapter in early April that it had hired a summer camp leader, Pascal Tessier, who was the first openly gay American to become an Eagle Scout, the highest ranking Scout. Gates also cited broader developments related to gay rights, and warned that rigidly maintaining the ban “will be the end of us as a national movement.”

The BSA faced potential lawsuits in New York and some other states if it continued to enforce its ban. And the exclusionary policy prompted numerous major corporations to suspend charitable donations to the Scouts in recent years.

Like several other major youth organizations, the Boy Scouts have experienced a membership decline in recent decades.